Knocked For Six
by patchworkdove
Summary: Prompt from the kink meme. Six/Older!Rex; Rex suffers another blackout and vanishes. Six's searches prove futile until he has a chance encounter when captured by Gatlocke's Anarchists.


**Prompt from the kink-meme;**

**Six/(Older) Rex**

**Rex has another memory blackout, and is found and brought up by Gatlocke. Providence finds him again years later as an axe-crazy "businessman" much like his new "dad", and they drag Rex in to try and bring back the Rex they once knew.**

**EDIT/ADDITION: I'd also be happy with Six being kidnapped and held hostage by Gatlocke's gang and him meeting adult-Rex that way, too.**

**Either way, lots of UST between Rex and Six, whether it does get resolved is up to the author. :3**

Six was by no means a fool. He was old enough to know when circumstances had escaped his control and he was wise enough to change tactics accordingly. This time, his enemies had called in reinforcements. Gatlocke's cavalry of cannon-toting hooligans had tipped the balance of power far out of his reach. He was many things; but a one-man-army wasn't one of them.

He wasn't a butchered carcass in the dirt either, yet. Defeat had raised its ugly head and Six had lowered his blades. He would go quietly and there would be no banquet for the buzzards today. The Anarchists would have been better off just shooting him in the desert, but they would be banking on striking a deal with Providence, using him as a bargaining chip. In the mean time, Six would sit and wait for them to make a fatal mistake.

There was a slight… misunderstanding as he was marched at gunpoint into the back of a heavily customised Jeep. One young punk tried to knock him unconscious with the butt of a rifle; understandable but completely inexcusable. Six broke the boy's arm to draw a line under the fact that his surrender was wholly conditional. It was brutally excessive, but Six's patience for people had rotted away with the passing years. Bitter just didn't cut it.

Otherwise, the bone-rattling Jeep trip across the desolate wastes was uneventful. Long and dusty, but without incident. Eventually, the convoy took a winding track of steep switchback turns into a narrow canyon that offered shelter from the relentless desert sun; clearly appreciated by Gatlocke's undisciplined, panting lackeys. Six had been sweltering in his green suit and tie, but he wouldn't give his captors the satisfaction of knowing it. Over his dead body. Literally.

The air was cooler down here and damp too, but without a clear line of sight to the sun above Six's capacity for tracking their direction of travel was scrambled. Communication signals would fare no better between the high rocky walls. The chasm was a shattered crack in the earth; crevices spidering away in every direction like a fractal maze. Escape via the canyon floor would be difficult and complex but it presented his best option. Although the canyon walls looked easy enough to scale, there was no guarantee that he wouldn't mistakenly climb a rock face that led to a blind, isolated summit encircled by more deep trenches.

Six was so focused on making precise mental notes of the right route back through the maze and the security systems present at the entrance to Gatlocke's underground lair that his first glance passed over the Hispanic teen sat at the gates. It was the glint of orange goggles pushed up amongst jagged peaks of short black hair that smashed the sense out of him more effectively than any rifle butt to the face ever could. Before he could recover at all and possibly kid himself that it could be just another false positive, just another boy who held a passing resemblance to Rex from a distance but was always heartbreakingly not ever going to be him; the boy looked up.

Rex smiled and nodded to the driver of the Jeep. He reached out, touched the solid metal blast doors and bright geometric patterns leapt across the surface as it obediently heaved open. Six could only stare back dumbly from behind his dark glasses, stupefied by the charismatic nonchalance of the encounter. After all that searching, after scouring the globe for each and every possible lead, pursuing them to exhaustion and all the while edging closer and closer to the gut-wrenching possibility that Rex was dead… here he was. Gatlocke's doorman in a canyon in the Badlands. The shock was monumental. Six held his vulnerability in check on the outside, but inside he felt physically sick with a putrid mix of volatile emotions.

Rex noticed the attention he was receiving and his expression hardened. He met Six with narrowed eyes and a slow but purposeful straightening of his posture. It was the body language of a confident young man telling Six that he'd better look away and mind his own business or he was going to get a bloody souvenir.

Six never found it easy to be looked at like a stranger by Rex again. Just because it had happened a few times before didn't mean he was ever ready for it. There had always been suspicion in the boy's warm brown eyes each time before, sometimes confused anger, but Rex had really grown this time. The serious, levelled promise of violence, squared chin and broadened shoulders were all new; Rex wasn't a frightened little boy anymore. He was a young man and the world was a level playing field to him.

Six didn't look away. He didn't crane his neck or twist in his seat to try to keep Rex in view as the Jeep lurched across the threshold or as the doors thundered shut behind them. It was hard enough to keep himself frozen in place with mock indifference as the knuckles of his fists whitened and his head swam.


End file.
